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Diebold Disks May Have Been For Testers
opencity writes "The Washington Post reports on the two Diebold source disks that were anonymously sent to a Maryland election official this past week. Further investigation has lead individuals involved to believe the disks came from a security check demanded by the Maryland legislature sometime in 2003." From the article: "Critics of electronic voting said the most recent incident in Maryland casts doubt on Lamone's claim that Maryland has the nation's most secure voting system. "There now may be numerous copies of the Diebold software floating around in unauthorized hands," said Linda Schade, co-founder of TrueVoteMD, which has pressed for a system that provides a verifiable paper record of each vote."
The new tagging system is cool. Diebold gets my "wretchedhiveofscumandvillainy" tag.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
How long until it's on BT?
Can't play on ranked servers without a cd key and the gameplay itself is more boring than WoW. I'll stick with BF2.
If the attackers can use the source code to attack the machines then the machines aren't secure and probably wouldn't withstand an attack from someone who had access to the machine even without source code.
Having numerous copies floating around is a good thing if disclosure of security holes is encouraged, and the fact that Diabold are implying that the security of their systems rely on people not having access to the source code is a very bad thing.
Lets look at things logically. The only people who would rig the election using those machines would have to have physical access to the machines, and if they did they wouldn't need the source code to highlight security holes. If the source code was released then the people who would be advantaged would be the people who would responsibly disclose security holes.
If the software was well designed, this wouldn't matter at all. I mean it should be clean and simple, and secure. All incoming data should be validated, all data should be stored, and a mile wide system audit trail should be created at the same time. Then, spit out the paper version with a transaction # so you can run it right back against the system.
Instead, I bet it's a pile of shit. Recycled code, buffer vulnerabilities, piles of ad hoc crap, with poor documentation.
I hope someone does find a way to exploit the code. People need to wake the hell up.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Face it, it would probably be a more secure voting system if they voted by email. They could even make it into a computer game to encourage more young people to vote!
Although, if they did vote by email, imagine the junkmail vote....
You gotta wonder about any politician that wants no paper trail of his own votes. Why is he not interested in having hardcopy proof that he really did win this or that election? (or she, or she, I hope to the gods that Americans aren't backward enough to have only male options in parliament).
Forgive if if I misunderstood, but shouldn't Linda Schade be happy that there's copies of the software available for public scrutiny instead of complaining about it? If she's really concerned with the security of electronic voting, surely she would be in favour of the software being verifiable?
If I didn't misunderstand, someone in D.C. should give this lady a call and explain to her the pitfalls of "security through obscurity" and why openness is a Good Thing.
that the versions, that have been anonymously submitted, were from the last election. Could someone be trying to tell us something? Will a third party have the chance to examine the contents?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Diebold whines about how the source code to their voting software is secret and copyrighted and blah blah... but you know what? Accurate democratic elections easily outweigh the need of any company providing voting software to keep their software secret. The government ought to be hiring a software company on contract to provide the service of writing voting software, not buying a product from them.
This is assuming, of course, that there's any overall benefit to digital voting in the first place, which there really isn't. Digital elections are a terrible idea -- stick with paper. Oh no! We'll have to wait a few more hours to have complete results! Big fucking deal.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I was one of the RABA testers. We discussed this today and we returned the disks to the testers. The leaks came from Linda Lamone's OWN OFFICE!
Just before the 2002 election, a secret "patch" was distributed by order of the president of Diebold without the knowledge of election officials, according to several whistleblowers. You know, the guy who promised to "deliver [Ohio's] votes to the President".
Who gives a fuck if J0e Hax0r can compromise a voting machine when secret code can be installed on thousands, if not all, of the voting machines at the last minute with absolutely no oversight and nobody knowing about it? Voting, to borrow from one of the current "President's" minions, is a "quaint" and outdated practice.
Considering that paper ballots have been used for TWO CENTURIES. Jesus Christ. Just make a machine that scans the barcode on a piece of paper, punches holes in it, and copies the data so no duplicate votes can be made or votes be changed since there will be a paper back up to turn in that will back up the electronic vote, and the voter gets a carbon copy of the paper. Wow. How hard was that to think up? Now, can I have all of the money that Diebold has been getting?!
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
Perhaps she's concerned about the give_election_to_highest_bidder() function being discovered..
It seems the solution has been staring us all in the face: someone must write a simple program to use the revealed code, that can be carried on a USB stick and used to modify votes. Then publicize the existence of this program. Since the election will clearly be fraudulent, and Mr Michael Mouse will be unable to take up more than one of the seats he has won, the election will have to be re-done, quickly, and un-hackably (ie, uncomputerised).
What is funny is that no one has commented on the real story here - Diebold sent a copy of the source code for a security audit, as requested. Maryland's security team then leaked the code to external people and used the incident to claim that Diebold's security is awful...
The real lesson here is the lengths some politicians will go to so that they appear "right".
(OK, and Diebold also has security issues - but that is a side issue, everyone has security issues. These are the guys making ATMs, for goodness sake. A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough. You can't stop human fraud via a machine - humans win every time.)
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I hope to the gods that Americans aren't backward enough to have only male options in parliament
Actually, our options for Parliament are even more limited than that...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You, the voter, need to physically move your verified ticket into a box under the watchful eye of the election judge. This MUST NOT be done by machine, unless the machine also does it in an easily visible fashion under the watchful eye of an election judge - which is simply not what's going on.
I early voted on a Diebold voter verified machine - and it's NOT good enough. I even had a nice conversation with the technical election judge, and since it did print a verified trail I did have to go home and think about this before I realized how it sucked.
They totally and complete circumvented the idea of a voter verified paper trail.
The way this machine works is you vote, it prints, you can see-but-not-touch the printout. You can vote AGAIN (up to 3 times) and it voids the previous printouts. Again, without you touching them. Which means the process expects that some percentage of its paper trail will be voided. The printouts get sent into some magic compartment.
So 1) there's no way except by noise for the election monitors to know if it printed a variety of extra votes. And they were pretty quiet.
2) There's absolutely zero way to know if it went back and voided your vote, because there's plenty of precedent for voiding votes.
3) It can absolutely tell via paper alone who voted in which order; it's on a spool. Which could be easily tracked by anyone who watched what order people voted at that machine. Your votes are even less anonymous.
*sigh*
(Ok, so I posted this on the previous Diebold story - sue me. It's important, so I reposted it, Karma be damned.)
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I would think the only kind of security leak you could have in a voting system would be who voted for whom. If knowledge of the voting machine hardware or software is a threat to the voting processes and it's publication is considered a security leak.....then who is whatching the watchers ?......Could we please set this up so a security leak on voting would mean: "Some physically stole the voting boxes". This is killing me. Is "Keep it Simple and Stupid" really that hard to understand ?
And how exactly would this patch be applied? It's not like the machines are turned on and connected to the internet when not in use on election day.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
What's with early voting anyway? How is that constitutional? or even a good idea? Surely spreading the vote (and elections volunteers) out over a month prior to an election invites fraud and accidents.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough."
Wasn't it just a few weeks ago people were finding the passwords for ATMs 'hidden' right there on the net with instructions on how to reprogram them from the front pannel so that it thought the 20s slot was actually dispensing $5s???
If this is the security we can expect...well, I just hope my side finds the password list before the other side. Those bastards are slimy cut and run warmongers who want to stay the course of flipflopping.
"These are the guys making ATMs, for goodness sake. A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough."
If the system were as secure as an ATM network I would have to agree. An ATM gives you a bit of paper to prove the transaction took place and are fully auditable by the bank, the voting machines in question do not give a receipt and do not leave an audit trail. The fact that diebold also makes ATM's indicates nothing less than malice in the design of such a piss poor security scheme for their voting machines.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Back in 2004 computer programmer Clint Curtis testified under oath that he had been asked by a congressman to write software that would make it possible to rig elections. He quite blandly states that "anyone" (with the expertise) could write software to rig elections, because the system has not been secured in any way.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I'd argue that the source code for voting machine should be made public in any circumstance. There is *no* reason to keep any part of the counting process secret. If there are exploitable holes in this process, that means the *process* is at fault, and should be redone until there are no holes.
If they were even half as secure as ATMs I think we'd all have far, far fewer problems. I don't think you've been paying much attention to the diebold articles around here lately.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Having numerous copies floating around is a good thing if disclosure of security holes is encouraged, and the fact that Diabold are implying that the security of their systems rely on people not having access to the source code is a very bad thing.
Did you spell "Diabold" that way on purpose (i.e., to evoke "diabolical" in our minds)? Either way, I'm ROTFLMAO!
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I don't think diebold is saying that people can use the source code to hack it. All things being equal (I am ephasizing that last statement, because I know people will ignore it otherwise) having the source code can only make it easier to hack into software. For example, if you intercept an encrypted message, knowing the general encryption algorithm is infinitely useful in determining what the message says.
I know this is an unpopular opinion on Slashdot (which is built around open-source principles), but it is true. I am not saying that diebold should be trusted, but I am saying that your assertion that closed source has to inherently be less secure than open source is flawed. A solid architecture is a solid architecture...
And yes, I know open source encourages people to look at the source and find flaws. In fact, I think diebold should be open-sourced. I just disagree with your assumptions.
God bless America. Go to hell you leftist swine.
And you're still right. And I'll mention again that I replied on my blog: How to have a democracy.
Peace and love, y'all
Simply replace the flash card, you know the one without any kind of seal. The problem extends further than just the machines, it involves many aspects of the procedures including access to the machines before election day. What the GP is saying has been reported many times, I leave it to you to find the relevant links.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
>A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough.
That's not what we're getting, as the research and disclosures have made painfully clear.
In any case, Diebold has had some trouble with ATMs, including the ATM reprogrammed as a jukebox and the ATMs infected by a virus.
Voting machines are a harder and more safety-critical application than ATMs. Voting machines have to preseve anonymity. Imagine how that would complicate banking. Then, the worst case failure of an ATM is that some money changes hands inappropriately and laywers earn lots of money sorting it out. The worst case failure of a voting system is an election lost to fraud, meaning the victors are the crooks. The damage is potentially incalculable: think of the nations ruined by having the wrong leaders.
No one commented on the story because it is too filthy to be true. But, Maryland gave away alot of power in order to show this scandal and help humanity a little. Because your last line: 'you can't stop human fraud via a machine' isn't true (and in my oppinion VERY unpatriotic). You CAN stop human fraud, with or without machines. This is the basis of a little fragement of that which still makes us human: trust and love, something you might want to look for.
Even if we won't prevail in the end, even if all hope seems lost, we at least can say to ourselfs: 'I tried!'. If this all might sound a little Christian in your ears, it is. And it is Muslim and Budhism, humanism and all of the other religions and philosophies in the world. Because the only thing you can possibly hope for is to have a little trust and love in other people.
For Christ sake, don't you see? Don't you see the terror and horror in all of this? Isn't it the distrust in the goverment or those who rule you, that made them suspisious in the first place? Isn't it your idea of 'right' that has been changed because of distrust?
Yes, there are alot of pricegrabbers our there: they might all fool on us, spy on us, make us feel angry or anxious. But they cannot take one important human trait away, and that is trust and love. Use your mind not to destroy, but use it to create.
This is a replacement signature.
Proper tags for this article may include "Diebold" "voting machines" "Maryland"
Surely you can think of some more useful tags like "electoral fraud", "corruption," "cronyism" ...
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
My county doesn't currently use electronic voting, but if they used Diebold voting machines I would vote absentee. If enough people do this, thereby increasing election costs, the message will get out. Just the potential for shenanigans should be enough to disqualify these things.
> Clinton for carpet bombing Serbia
So Milosovich was valiant anti-imperialist?
Right.
And the Islamists are striking a blow against imperialism? By stoning women to death? Or chanting Islam is a religion of peace!! and shooting a 75 year old nun?
No problem with jailing the Bushies (for falsifying inteligence), and 41 for crack dealing, but Clinton? I don't like NAFTA as much as the next lefty but Clinton should be ignored, not jailed.
The problem with the knee jerk left is s/left/off left/
"A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough." No, it isn't. You defraud my ATM you can steal my money, but the bank will reimburse me, and overall there's not much harm done. You steal my vote, you can do a lot worse things to me than take my money away.
I know this is an unpopular opinion on Slashdot (which is built around open-source principles), but it is true. I am not saying that diebold should be trusted, but I am saying that your assertion that closed source has to inherently be less secure than open source is flawed. A solid architecture is a solid architecture...
I think the reasoning here on slashdot tends to be that: Without the source code you cannot say whether something is more secure or less secure therefore the safest assumtion is that it is less secure. So not having access to the source doesn't make something inherently less secure, just makes it inherently less trustworthy.
Seeing the source would allow verification of the security of the design. Not seeing the source lends an air of "security through obscurity," sort of a "trust us, it's secure" which doesn't go over well.
The US is not a democracy. We are a republic!
On the voting side of things, you are not about to get an electronic voting machine that is free of possible rigging until State Governments start paying software engineers directly, to develop voting machines. Even then, physical security of the voting machines will need to be ensured up until (And even after!) the certified results. I completely agree with you on the need for openness and review for such machines. This includes a vote log which reduces the "Secret ballot" that we are said to currently have in districts that do paper voting.
Why leak something to a trusted official? Just think of the intent of leaking it to an official who is critical of the machines.
If the intent is to disclose code only then there are many other BETTER methods.
Anybody see the new film "Man of the Year"?
Does art predict life now instead of imitate it?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's always true :-(
So Milosovich was valiant anti-imperialist?
Right.
One theory is that Milosovich was winning his war-crimes trial at the Hague, and was going to call Bill Clinton as a hostile witness in his defense. Mighty convenient that he died of a 'heart attack'. But what do I know, I'm just the jester on the sidelines.
And the Islamists are striking a blow against imperialism? By stoning women to death? Or chanting Islam is a religion of peace!! and shooting a 75 year old nun?
The controlled media picks up on the worst-of-the-worst in the islamic world, to make sure 'we' look down on 'them' as primitive. There are plenty of examples of nasty people in our own midst - who are we to look down on bad-apple islamists shooting a nun, when two American Highschoolers slaughtered 10 buddhist monks in a petty war game/robbery?
NAFTA is the least of Clinton's transgressions: Who Said Clinton Didn't Kill Anybody?
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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The US is not a democracy. We are a republic!
Right! And now that the right people are in power, elections are superfluous anyways."
The only way having the security level of an ATM works is if the system works like an ATM. You can trust an ATM because there's an auditable record of transactions in your account. When ATM errors or fraud occur, you can point them out to the bank and get them reversed.
That would work fine for voting as long as the nation is willing to give up the tradition of the secret ballot. Until then, what auditable record exists of your individual vote, with your name attached to it so you can contest the way it was counted?
Counting secret ballots is *not* the same as posting transactions to audited financial accounts.
You obviously haven't done any sort of cryptography. (And yes, I have and do do cryptography and cryptoanalysis.)
I'll address the second and third paragraphs first of all since it's more on topic before refuting the first paragraph.
I never said that a closed source software has to be inherently less secure than open source software. Whether the source is open or not doesn't have any direct implications on the security of the software. I said or implied that closed alrogithms are inherently less trustworthy than closed algorithms. Peer revue is an old and very well tested notion that lays the foundation for modern cryptography, and it is more than "look at the source and find flaws". I'll quickly outline the reasons for it here.
On Corey Doctorow's excellent speech on DRM he slyly called this Schneider's Law: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it". In other words if you thought of it then you probably only see its benifits without seeing its flaws. For someone to see the flaws they have to be able to think differently; not necessarily be smarter than you, just be able to think differently from you. The chances of getting someone to be able to do this in a small organisation is slim. Even sending it out to technical officers only increases the chances of it being found slightly.
The next reason more specific to this situation comes when you look at the likely attackers of the system. When looking at the voting machine you tend to think of politicians to be the most likely to compromise security. You might also have major corporations with a political adgenda, foreign governments, even private citizens. In other words, everyone. Not many people actually realise that this includes the programmers themselves!
Do you trust every person in Diabold? I don't even know them - who the fuck are they to have control over my vote? (Luckily I'm not American so they don't have control over my vote) If the code is secret then they not only have the means but they also have the ability to do it without getting caught! If you personally don't have access to the code you are simply giving your vote to the programmers and trusting them to do the right thing. I'm not saying that they're necessarily bad people, but there's a lot of money in the US elections, and everyone has a price.
I haven't really gone through that thoroughly and I think I've missed more than a few things but I don't really have that much time free. I'll get onto the first paragraph now. Firstly, gathering an algorithm without source from a binary is pretty trivial and as I said before the people most likely to attack these machines will have access to the machines themselves and thus have access to the binaries. Even without this, perhaps not knowing the algorithm is a disadvantage to a cryptoanalysist but even then many algorithms have identifiers in their output giving clues as to which algorithm it is. It's definitely not infinitely more useful to know the algorithm when determining what the message says. Even so if you're relying on an algorithm's secrecy to ensure security in your communications then as soon as the algorithm is released (and it most often is in more serious situations) then your communications are compromised. Yes you said all things being equal but the thing is the algorithm isn't supposed to be the secret, the key is.
Now that was a long rant.
(OK, and Diebold also has security issues - but that is a side issue, everyone has security issues. These are the guys making ATMs, for goodness sake. A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough. You can't stop human fraud via a machine - humans win every time.)
There's even more money and power in cracking elections then there is in cracking ATMs, so no it's not good enough.
The Baltimore sun says that "Kagan called the attorney general's office, and word of the disks began to spread. Learning of the development, Linda H. Lamone, the state's elections chief, reported Kagan's possession of the code to the FBI yesterday [Oct 19]."
Which only reinforces my point, since
Attorney General > State Election Chief
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Voting machines with WiFi have been produced, and apparently not as a joke. The commodity hardware from Diebold includes an IRDA port.
"For example, if you intercept an encrypted message, knowing the general encryption algorithm is infinitely useful in determining what the message says."
Things have progress somewhat since WW2 and the enigma machines, ever hear of public key encryption? You can examine the algorithim to any arbitrary level of detail but it won't help you to decrypt a message.
OTOH: I agree with the rest of your post, the most that can be said of diebold's "security through obscurity" is that it's an unknown quantity. Mind you there are enough visable holes in their procedures to render the source code debate moot.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
ABC News is running a poll titled Is Your Vote Safe? that asks:
"Are you confident that your vote is safe and will be counted in the election?"
Oddly, this poll seems to be suffering some voting irregularities itself. Repeatedly refreshing the results yields this strange sequence:
approx 12:30am, 10-23-06
no: 738 yes: 101 ns: 86 tot: 925
12:53am
no: 743 yes: 101 ns: 87 tot: 931
12:54am
no: 737 yes: 101 ns: 86 tot: 924
12:55am
no: 746 yes: 101 ns: 88 tot: 935
12:56am
no: 670 yes: 84 ns: 80 tot: 834
12:57am
no: 721 yes: 99 ns: 85 tot: 905
12:58am
no: 734 yes: 101 ns: 86 tot: 921
and that mistake is that he/she did not make as many copy's as possible to distribute them to as many journalists as possible. heck i would of done that and put it up on a few Usenet sites.
... in the backwards, barbarous and poor country of Brasil, our elections have been 99% eletronic for the past 9 years, without any hicup... one can imagine that perhaps the monkeys, snakes and tigers are helping us vote somehow...
People will use something for whatever suits them best, not what the marketer says to use it for. Clearly slashdotters want to use tags for one-word comments, so that's what they get used for. Music didn't really occur to the inventors of the phonograph, and look how that turned out.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
The fact that diebold also makes ATM's indicates nothing less than malice in the design ...
Diebold BOUGHT the voting machine deisgn (by buying the company that made it). It is unrelated to their ATM designs.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Unless your initials are G Dubya B...
I wasn't trying to imply throwing out secret ballots, just pointing out that ATM's are auditable and these machines are not. The "bit of paper" I was talking about is not kept by the voter but the candidates can use them to audit the machines without connecting individuals to "bits of paper".
The ATM analogy is a bad one since banks must connect an individual to a transaction. Voting machines must not connect an individual to a transaction while still ensuring one vote per person. It's not particularly hard to do, the issues have been well understood for at least a couple of centuries.
Having said that, diebold have shown they understand security and auditing issues by producing reliable ATM's, they have not done the same for voting machines. Given diebold's experience with ATM security issues it is hard to see how incompetence has played a part in this particular cock-up.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Let's see if you can tell where these are from:
fud, no, yes, rms, notfud
scam, slownewsday
yay, spam, spamhaus, haha
wikipedia, copyright
fud, notfud, monopoly
'glad to see the system is working well.
The ______ Agenda
You don't have gazillions of dollars worth of 'investment' waiting for payback as soon as the guy becomes president (nobody is so naive to believe that (a) an election is won by the best and (b) that nobody wants to see a return on the $$ they funded the candidate with).
The election in the US HAD to be rigged to ensure that payback (Return On Investment -ROI- of the most insiduous kind), but I must say that in the US history this is about the most blatant example yet. I guess it shows that it's well beyond rescue. Al Gore summed it up best: "we've seen an energy bill written by oil companies, a prescription drug bill written by pharmaceutical lobbyists, and a global warming policy run by the biggest polluters."
The easiest way to rig an election for a country as large as the US is to impair the fundamentals - hence Diebold getting the job. You could call them the Microsoft of the voting machines - "we don't care about quality as long as it sells". And in this case it appears it's exactly the flaws that enabled them to sell. After all, those that take the 'buy' decision are the ones that need the lack of security. A mild conflict of interest..
If you want any more evidence, just look at the official outrage that followed the unearthing of all the problems with Diebold. Yes, exactly - none whatsoever.
And this lot wants to bring 'democracy' to the countries it starts wars in. Yeah, right - let's be a bit more realistic: it keeps the problems off the front page.. See a recent BBC article for a good example..
> One theory is that Milosovich was winning his war-crimes trial at the Hague, and was going to call Bill Clinton as a hostile witness in his defense. Mighty convenient that he died of a 'heart attack'. But what do I know, I'm just the jester on the sidelines.
Another theory is UFOs control the state of Nevada. Do some reading about the history of the Balkans, moron. NATO could certainly be called on the carpet of DU weapons poisoning the landscape but that's a different issue.
> The controlled media picks up on the worst-of-the-worst in the islamic world
Dude (if indeed you are male) Ronald Reagan financed an armies of torturing murderous rapists by smuggling drugs into the United States while Nancy was championing just say no. But how does that excuse stoning women to death? Research the feminist movement in the Islamic world and see what the women who have to live under these trodlydites have to say.
The problem with you fools is you reduce polititical discourse to the level of arguing about dungeons and dragons and then the right wing paints all progressives as illiterate nut cases. Unless of course you're paid by Karl Rove, in which case you're a 9/11 Truth jerk off.
Please ensure election is rigged.
Sincerely, Diebold CEO.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
No, your digression introduces the subject of stealing, which has nothing to do with elections and Diebold and, well, Diebold, elections, and stealing just do not belong in the same sentence. The juxtaposition is stupid to even contemplate. The analogy even gets worse when you realize that with BT, your contribution makes a difference.
A better parallel would be to pass the value of $vote to /dev/null, then return the value of $Repubs_win.
Or am I missing something? (Rhetorical question, btw)
Apparently some of the moderators tonight prefer blue. (matrix reference)
I take the stand that "it's not our job to police the world". While we're off screwing up Iraq, social problems here at home are only getting worse. Bad things happen in the world. The only place we have the power to fix them is here at home. Interventions in foreign countries only tend to make things worse - women's status in Iraq pre- and post-invasion, for example.
Do some reading about the history of the Balkans, moron.
Seeing as how the victors write the history books, I'm not too sure what to believe. I do know that we had an exchange student from Macedonia for a semester, and he had no love lost for Billy Clinton. I wasn't around much at the time, so I don't know specifically what his perspective was. Found an old email address, perhaps I should write.
The U.S.-led destruction of Yugoslavia fits nicely into the conspiratorial overview of the covert power games btwn west and east...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I do not believe that we must not have machines in order to have a reasonable level of fraud resistance. I believe that machines with human-readable-only recountable ballots which are placed, by the voter, into a box that is easily visible to all election judges is a great solution. If the machine never places those votes into the machine itself, you have a reasonably suitable audit trail.
And then the machines are used for what they're supposed to be - speeding up the initial vote count.
That said, I DO think we should throw out the machines until we can get them right.
Also, I'm not sure about mentioning "again" - I don't see anywhere you previously mentioned your blog post on here.
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Receipts and audit trails in voting systems are solving the wrong problem.
If you have a leaky roof, the correct solution is not to install a drainage trough in the floor. If you go down the floor drain route you will eventually end up installing an alarm system to detect blockages, a plug-in air freshener to deal with the smell when the blockage alarm fails to go off and the drain gets blocked, joss sticks for use during power failures when neither the alarm nor the plug-in air freshener work, and you'll still have a leaky roof.
If there is any way for the person who cast a vote to be able to identify it as theirs, then there is also a way for someone else to do identify who cast a vote. Which creates the opportunity for corruption. If voters are issued with a receipt for the transaction, which they remove, then a failure mode is introduced where the receipt does not match the ballot. Also, unless receipts are readily falsifiable, an opportunity for corruption is created (imagine a boss allowing workers time off to vote as long as they shew their receipt, showing a vote for the local Tory candidate and the boss's cousin, on returning to the factory). And if receipts are readily falsifiable then they are of questionable value. If there is a separate audit log stored within the machine, there is still the failure mode where the log does not match the ballot.
Much better would be to ensure that procedures are in place such that it is as difficult as possible for the result to be interfered with after a ballot is cast. The easiest and best way of doing this is still pencil-and-paper, one race per ballot, one box per race (with different coloured and/or sized papers, so that a ballot in the wrong box can quickly be identified and moved to the right pile) and manual counting in the polling station, under the scrutiny of representatives of all candidates. Disabled voters should be allowed to bring a carer whom they trust to help them use the same system as everybody else.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"Maryland's security team then leaked the code to external people and used the incident to claim that Diebold's security is awful..."
There is no actual proof that it happened this way. References to labels and 'documents' don't connect these disks with Maryland. It could have happened anywhere along the chain. It isn't the first time Diebold software has leaked.
"A team led by Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins, examined the machines' source code, which a Diebold worker anonymously published on the Internet earlier this year"
"The FTP button gave total access to anonymous users, allowing anyone to download and apparently, upload to the server. The FTP site contained no copyright statement, asked for no user name, put locks on no directories. Visitors from anywhere in the world could simply walk in the front door."
"Last week's revelation by Diebold that its automated teller machines (ATMs) operated by two financial services customers were struck by the W32/Nachi worm"
davecb5620@gmail.com
Nice sentiments but in so far as elections go a secret ballot that is counted by people who all distrust each other guarentees the fairest outcome. At the risk of repeating myself the simplest example I know is a parent teaching their kids how to share, one cuts the cup-cake the other one gets first choice. This method doesn't extend to every situation ( see king solomon and the divide the baby story ), but in "seen to be fair" elections, distrust amongst the competitors is channeled towards a general trust in the outcome, and don't forget "the government" is composed of humans who deserve our love but must earn the extrodinary trust we give them ( eg: capital punishment ).
The processes for fair elections are well known, the processes for getting elected are somewhat more obscure.
"No one commented on the story because it is too filthy to be true.
I agree that the first dozen or so pages of OT comments demonstrates either a failure in the mod system or a failure in the political system.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough.
I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. When it comes to security, "good enough" is good enough.
In the case of ATMs, banks make a huge amount of money (or at least avoid losign a huge amount of business) by having them. But they don't have to be particularly secure -- just secure enough that the marginal cost of adding a bit of security is greater than the marginal increment of savings. In other words in business you don't "spend a buck to save a buck".
"Good enough" security systems abound; for example credit cards and checks. The security of these systems are extremely lax, and consequently there is a _ton_ of fraud commited with them. But the cost of paying for fraud (to the banks) is less than trying to get an increment of security. Businesses do not subscribe to the "millions for defense, not one dollar for tribute" theory of security.
It seems like a manufacturer of ATMs would be the perfect manufacturer of voting machines, until you take into account the difference between "good enough" for an ATM and "good enough" for a voting machine. Money is fungible -- a bit of fraud here and there is amply made up by profits elsewhere. Votes are not like that. Having a fair election in 95% of the districts doesn't make up for having a fraudulent election in 5%, especially when those districts can be strategically chosen.
It would be better to pick somebody with experience in systems where system failures have horrible, unthinkable results rather than a vendor where failures are just an incovenience. Somebody who makes avionics, or medical instrumenation, or defense command and control systems.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So, tell me again about how Bush "Won" ANYTHING?
Show all work.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Like, say, the USA since 2000?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
If the attackers can use the source code to attack the machines then the machines aren't secure and probably wouldn't withstand an attack from someone who had access to the machine even without source code.
This point is so critical it deserves reiteration.
Secrecy is a not a substitute for robustness. Relying on secrecy actually hinders achieving robustness.
Where security really matters, you actually try to reduce your reliance on secrecy, if possible to nothing or to a single thing that is nearly impossible to guess. You don't rely upon your methods being secret, because (a) you can't trust everyone who needs to know the methods and (b) the methdos are easy to guess. The fact that Diebold relies upon secrecy of its source code to make the machines secure means that they are simply not secure as judged by professional stanards.
The difference between secrecy and robustness is the difference between hiding your money under your mattress and hiding it in a bank vault. Is it better to rely on how hard it is to guess where the money is stashed, or how hard it is to get at the money knowing precisely where it is?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
somebody post OpenDieVote software before November 7th, please ;)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I agree with you to a point, but I think that trying to enforce fairness with a machine is a bad idea. Think about this - the current system works (in as much as it does work) because people on both sides have the same access, and can check to be sure the other person didn't cheat. Once you introduce technology, the playing field is no longer level - one side (the more tech-savy side) may be able to cheat without the other side even knowing.
So I guess if we are going to use machines in this, I would prefer that the machines be extremely simple - such that the very old people sitting at the election booth monitoring the election can actually resolve any problems that come up. Short of that, we need to realize that it is not possible to really secure a system against a dedicated opponent. This is a human problem, and it needs a human solution.
"Good enough" security systems abound; for example credit cards
I'll let you in on an even better kept secret - banks make money from fraud! When you are defrauded on the internet, your credit rating takes a hit, the merchant loses the value of the transaction plus $20, and the bank shows $20 revenue, probably $5 profit. Banks are actually incentivized to increase fraud!
So, why do we not have secureid-like credit cards again?
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Many models of voting machines *are* networked, usually over POTS analog modems. I have no idea whether the Diebold models involved in this flap are wired on electron day. But I do know that they have IR ports which you can use to access their
memory, if you are in range.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
If by "nations ruined by having the wrong leaders" you mean where a small group of leaders ignores all contrary advise, engages the nation in a quagmire of war on false pretenses that has no clear benefit, causes massive loss of life, financially strains the country, and actually increases general foreign animosity and the threat of terrorism, then I'm not sure what you are talking about. Oh, wait....
You ask this like it is a remote possability in the future. It was already done:
0 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,60563,0
"LekTronik votin with pyuters" may be inevitabl because as we all know the more tech stuff and techies and the fewer peopl and manual processes it takes to do something the better, cooler, more efficient, modern, stylish, consumption intensive, profitable etc. ad nauseum it is. The problem is that it creates what is effectively a single point of control and so a single point of failure.
As I have said before, using anything other than paper and pen to vote, and very granular human networks simply creates tools for fraud. While it is perfectly easy to stuff a ballot box, it is much easier to stuff them all with a few lines of code. This is especially true in an environment wherein few are willing to destabilize the system, much less the entire government, by exposing the profundity of corruption that has become the very fabric of the socio-political structure of the United States. Most woukd rather just get the upper hand so they can take advantage of the tools themselves.
Heres been my theory on Electronic voting for awhile. Yes, the system is more expensive, but at some point we need to weigh the cost/benifit of true elections.
When people come in to vote, they're checked off the list by the front table, as is done today. They go to a booth with a machine, where they touch screen and cast their votes. The machine, then, prints off a sheet, with their votes in some sort of machine-readable barcodes, which are encrypted with a public key. This means that anyone could develop the equipment to read these codes (which is key to my next step) but actually creating them is much more difficult. The votes are also tabulated on a main system at this time.
They then take that sheet of barcodes to another station. This station is developed by a seperate company. They slide it in, and then look through a hood on a screen as their votes are decoded from the barcodes. They press a YES / NO button to "is this how you wanted to vote?" The sheet is then either stored away securely. This system also tabulates the votes on their own main system.
At the end of the night, both main systems vote numbers are compared. If there is a difference, they can check all the barcoded recipts that are stored away to verify the real count.
Of course, bonus points for all the systems running OSS software...
The "penalties" one would suffer for acquiring and distributing this code, the very same penalties that prevent BoEs from publishing it for public inspection, have absolutely nothing to do with any law about elections.
No, we are talking about software licensing violations and copyright protections. Diebold has a mile-long list of things you can and cannot do with their software -- and they agressively use their lackies inside the BoEs to wield those contract terms in a way that is designed to intimidate those who would try to secure our elections by threatening their jobs.
Someone had to do it.
To find a discreet expert who could have gone over the code before submitting it. In that case, one could submit the code on CD/DVD with printouts of offending lines such as:
if ($candidate eq 'John Smith' && $bribe_paid == 1)
{
if ($random {
$votes{$candidate} ++;
}
}
$votes{$candidate} ++;
Never excuse by stupidity that which can be adequately be explained by conniving and greed
Howard screamed and he lost.
Can all these things be adequately explained by stupidity alone?
-- QED
A wise man knows the most important things; a shrewd man knows the most important people. Nobody knows everything or everybody, or needs to.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
Kinda scary, actually.
how is the magic box in the machine different from the magic box that I physically but my ballot in?
Why does the election monitor have to be aware when someone make a mistake?
I do understand why #3 is a concern (if that is really how things work), but I don't understand your other points.
Once you introduce technology, the playing field is no longer level - one side (the more tech-savy side) may be able to cheat without the other side even knowing.
There are computer-illiterate morons and Slashdot-reading hackers on both sides of the political spectrum. It may be true that there are more tech-savvy Democrats than Republicans, but there are some really smart Republicans (not necessarily the people actually in office, but the people behind the scenes, pulling the strings, have connections). After all, isn't it mostly Republicans who are being accused of using broken voting machines to tip the balance to their side?
A level playing field isn't the issue here. The issue is transparency and accountability.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Two problems with your tin-foil hat theory.
In 2002, there was no presidential election. George Bush was elected in 2000, and the second election was in 2004.
The second problem with your theory, is that there were *** NO DIEBOLD MACHINES *** used in Ohio in the 2004 election.
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/News/Read.aspx?ID=102
"COLUMBUS - Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell today halted deployment of Diebold Election Systems' electronic voting devices in Ohio for the 2004 General Election. The decision is based on preliminary findings from the secretary of state`s second round of security testing conducted by Compuware Corporation showing the existence of previously identified, but yet unresolved security issues. Hardin, Lorain and Trumbull counties had selected to use new Diebold equipment this November. Those counties will use their current voting devices in 2004."
Final 2006 "Proof of Global Warming" US Hurricane Count -> 0
> These are the guys making ATMs, for goodness sake.
Yes. Horrifying thought isn't it.
I personally avoid ATMs that carry the Diebold badge.
Your statement is true when all the parties which participate in the democratic process are in possession of all the facts. The simple fact that 'possesion of facts' is greatly influenced by the media makes this institution one of the foundations of our democratic process. Once you are not an all-knowing individual, trust plays a very important role. Or should I not put it this bluntly?
"I agree that the first dozen or so pages of OT comments demonstrates either a failure in the mod system or a failure in the political system."
I'm afraid it is the latter, which implies the former (as both our political systems are based on votes, which is also demonstrated by the Slashdot moderation system).
This is a replacement signature.
Debating the existence of the disks or examinations of the same is a waste of time, none of this is relevant. Even if Diebold uploaded this "source code" to SourceForge tomorrow, there is no way to know that is it the same source that will be used in the machines during an election, or that there is not an issue with the compilation of such code, or that it has not been infected with other code after installation, or that a swap or flash of the firmware on the machines is not an issue.
There might be a way to use electronic voting if the whole process was open enough, both in design and implementation and the equipment was physically secure enough. However at this time the only effective way I can see to ensure the elections are accurate is to dump the whole effort and go back to paper and pencil. While we are at it make the voting period longer, several days would make sense to me.
I actually prefer the idea of runoff type of election that would allow for 1st and 2nd and etc choices. This would go a long way toward eliminating the stranglehold of the good cop/bad cops mess we get from a two or even three party system. But at the very least we must make sure people that eligible can vote and that they have a confidence that their vote will be counted accurately.
On other issues, the gerrymandering of voting districts is probably as serious a problem or worse. We need to clean this up before we have a chance at having representation that we are able to hold accountable. This along with actual serious efforts to do something about the ways money is involved in elections AND influences over the voting of our representatives must be addressed.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
Running Firefox 2.0, man the built in spell checking is sweet, and the hangs on tab switching during page loading I got on the last version seems fixed. Thanks Mozilla Folks!!!!!